Saturday Quiz – January 28, 2011

Posted on Saturday, January 28, 2012 by bill

Welcome to the billy blog Saturday quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention over the last seven days. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
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The US is not an example of a fiscal contraction expansion

Posted on Friday, January 27, 2012 by bill

Recent data releases suggest that the current economic experience on the two sides of the Atlantic is very different. The latest data shows that the UK economy is now contracting and unemployment is rising as fiscal austerity begins to bite. Conversely, the latest US data shows that growth is on-going and the unemployment rate is finally starting to fall. This may be a temporary return to growth because the political developments that may occur later in this year could see some serious, British-style fiscal austerity being imposed on the US economy. At present though, my assessment of these disparate trends is that fiscal austerity is contractionary if non-government spending is insufficient to offset the decline in public spending. However, some observers are trying to hold out the US experience as vindicating those who believe in the notion of a “fiscal contraction expansion”. But the data tells us clearly that the US is not an example of this mania.
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Posted in Britain, Eurozone, US economy | 4 Comments

Davos – an exercise in denial not solutions

Posted on Thursday, January 26, 2012 by bill

Most of the failed political leaders and their corporate mates are in Switzerland at the moment, presumably wining and dining in fine style and pontificating about what the rest of this need to do next. The sheer preposterousness of the World Economic Forum in Davos is astounding. There remains a denial by the leaders of what has to be done. They seem insistent that the failed neo-liberal paradigm should remain intact. Apparently, calls for reforms just reflect an unrealistic nostalgia for the past. It is apparently nostalgic (meaning nonsensical) for us to long for the days when nations delivered full employment, real wages growth in line with productivity, and declining inequality. This accusation of nostalgic longing is the way the elites are avoiding facing the facts that their economic model based upon self-regulating markets has failed and will never deliver on its promises. We need a new approach that recognises the capacities and options available to a currency-issuing national government. This is not a nostalgic longing for an unchanged world. Rather it is a realisation that the macroeconomic fundamentals of a currency-issuing national state have not changed, notwithstanding the challenges that globalisation presents.
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Posted in Economics | 18 Comments

IMF – the height of hypocrisy but still wrong as usual

Posted on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 by bill

When I read the latest news from the IMF early this morning I sent out a tweet saying that it was the height of hypocrisy for the IMF now to be trying to reclaim the high ground in the current economic debate by lecturing nations about the dangers of fiscal austerity. The IMF will always be part of the problem rather than the solution. They are consistently the architects of misinformation and bully national governments on the basis of that misinformation only to come back 3 months later and say “gee whiz”, look how bad things become. Currently the IMF is pleading for more funds. If I was a national government contributing to this bullying, incompetent organisation I would immediately cancel the cheque and, instead, spend the money pursuing domestic growth for the benefit of the citizens is that rely on my decisions. The current position of the IMF represents the height of hypocrisy. Further their forecasts are significantly error prone as usual. Wrong models will generally produce terrible forecasts that have to be continually revised. In the case of the IMF, these errors are also systematically biased by the ideological nature of their approach to macroeconomics.
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New central bank initiative shows governments are not financially constrained

Posted on Tuesday, January 24, 2012 by bill

On November 16, 2011 by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) published a – Discussion Paper – Implementing Basel III liquidity reforms in Australia – which details how the prudential regulator plans to implement the new Basel III reforms which aim “to strengthen the liquidity framework for authorised deposit-taking institutions (ADIs)”. in that paper, APRA indicated that there were not enough assets in the Australian financial system to satisfy the new liquidity requirements. In other words, there are not enough government bonds on the issue that the banks can use for this purpose. This is a consequence of the excessive pursuit of government surpluses over the last 16 odd years. APRA indicated that a country-specific solution to this asset would be required. in this context, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) a new facility – the Committed Liquidity Facility (CLF), which will provide high-quality liquidity to the commercial banks to allow them to meet the Basel III liquidity requirements. What the CLF demonstrates once again is that a currency issuing government is not financially constrained and can maintain integrity of the of the financial system and purchase any goods and services that are available for sale in its own currency any time that it chooses.
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Employment fell in December, no it didn’t employment rose – and other apparent inconsistencies

Posted on Monday, January 23, 2012 by bill

In the last few weeks I have done several radio interviews about the veracity of the labour force data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The pretext has been an increasing awareness among commentators and journalists of an alternative series published by pollster – Roy Morgan. The juxtaposition of an ABS unemployment rate estimate for December 2011 of 5.2 per cent against Roy Morgan’s estimate of 8.6 per cent worries people and curious minds have been seeking to find out what is going on. The curiosity also extends to matters like seasonal adjustment. Last week, I consistently said that in seasonally adjusted terms people were dropping out of the labour force (as evidenced by the falling participation rate), which had lessened the impact of the negative employment growth on the unemployment. But in one interview I complicated matters by saying that in fact more people were in the labour force in December and employment rose. The two statements were not inconsistent. The former was about the seasonally-adjusted data and the latter was about the original time series produced by the ABS. I often get E-mails about this question. Which estimates should we use to tell us what is going on? So I thought I should write a blog about that – to catalogue these issues.
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Saturday quiz – January 21, 2011 – answers and discussion

Posted on Sunday, January 22, 2012 by bill

Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you understand the reasoning behind the answers. If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
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Saturday Quiz – January 21, 2011

Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2012 by bill

Welcome to the billy blog Saturday quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention over the last seven days. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
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The catechism of the IMF

Posted on Friday, January 20, 2012 by bill

In early January 2012, the IMF published the following working day – Central Bank Credit to the Government: What Can We Learn from International Practices? (thanks Kostas). In terms of the title you can’t learn very much if you start off on the wrong foot. The bottom line is that if the theoretical model that you are using is flawed in the first place then you wont make much sense applying it. The other point is that while this paper presents some very interesting facts about the legal frameworks within which central banks operate and provide a regional breakdown of their results, their policy recommendations do not relate to the evidence at all. This is because they fail to recognise that the patterns in their database (the legal practices) are conditioned by the dominant mainstream economics ideology. So concluding that something is desirable because it exists when its existence is just the reflection of the dominant ideology gets us nowhere. Their conclusions thus just amount to erroneous religious statements that make up the catechism of the IMF and have no substance in reality.
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Australian labour force data – things are getting worse

Posted on Thursday, January 19, 2012 by bill

The January release of the Labour Force data is always a week later than the releases in other months as we enjoy the summer holidays. But the wait hasn’t improved the news. In December 2011, my headline was “everything is bad” meaning that the evil three – falling employment, rising unemployment and falling participation – had appeared. Today’s release by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) of the Labour Force data for December 2011 shows that the deterioration in the Australian economy towards the end of the year gathered pace. The data shows that employment has fallen and the participation rate has fallen sharply. This is the worst combination that can occur indicating that job creation is declining, workers are leaving the workforce because of the lack of job opportunities and labour underutilisation is rising. So while the Government continues to pursue its obsession to get the budget back into surplus in the next year, it is actually only succeeding in undermining employment growth and prolonging unemployment. The most striking expression of how poor the Australian labour market is performing is the continued deterioration of the youth labour market. That should be a policy priority but unfortunately the government is largely silent on that issue. My assessment of today’s results are that – everything is bad and getting worse.
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Posted in Labour Force | 5 Comments